Mixed Bag

Xenogoth has a great new post up in his ongoing examination of p-work: “Patchwork Pub Chat”. It concerns a bar room conversation with a city planner, and the conceptual diagonal of high connectivity/low integration. Ultimately, the city planner – while expressing sentiments close to the secessionist drive – finds this schema to be “too corporate”. Regardless, this is exactly the kind of conversation that should be had, right where the graph paper meets the jungle of concrete, metal, wires, and governing protocols. This brings to mind Jacobite’s recent article on the major trends in “innovative governance”, which splits the terrain into two camps (each with their own subdivisions): the heterodox and the mainstream. While this blog sits squarely in the heterodox camp – the vantage point of acceleration cannot but problematize the goings-on in the mainstream – it is nonetheless the mainstream that will bear the fruits of these alien signals (or at least in the short term).

Xenogoth makes a great point, referencing Fernando Mendez and Micha Germann’s exciting study of sovereignty referendums, which had found that while secessionist politics are steadily rising, this has not yet wounded the drive towards political integration. He writes:

It seems obvious to me now, nationally and internationally, that there is a conflict over which future will win out — unified or patchwork. Desires for both seem internalised by many.

Couldn’t agree more! The argument that I would want to pose is that something like patchwork is ultimately inevitable – maybe not codified as strongly as many adherents would hope (indeed, it stands to ask: besides geopolitical fracture and sovereign stabilization, will we not see increased non-linear conflict in the course of x-risk democratization?) – but multiplying poles of power at the expense of the integrated politico-economic bloc. This was the argument of my old “Unconditional Acceleration and the Question of Praxis” piece (ayy, published just one year and a few days ago). The gambit was to cross the temporal swirl of acceleration (technomic spiraling towards a singularity point) with a broadening of the Hayekian knowledge problem by way of Kevin Carson’s critique of contemporary organizational dynamics and Yaneer Bar-Yam’s analysis of the impact of complexification on organization on the scale of civilizational history. If one has the time, I strongly recommend the uh first 350 pages of Carson’s 600+ page tome Organization Theory(pdf warning); if not, definitely give Bar-Yam’s “Complexity Rising: From Human Beings to Human Civilization, A Complexity Profile” a go. The conclusion of Bar-Yam’s work points, in my opinion, to the ultimate failure of larger systems of political integration, and why political organization will be routed down to smaller and smaller units:

…A schematic history of human civilization reflects a growing complexity of the collective behavior of human organizations. The internal structure of organizations changed from the large branching ratio hierarchies of ancient civilizations, through decreasing branching ratios of massive hierarchical bureaucracies, to hybrid systems where lateral connections appear to be more important than the hierarchy. As the importance of lateral interactions increases, the boundaries between subsystems become porous. The increasing collective complexity also is manifest in the increasing specialization and diversity of professions. Among the possible future organizational structures are fully networked systems where hierarchical structures are unimportant.

If we take the motor of complexification to be accelerating technomic feedback, then we arrive at a formulation that high connectivity may very well be what induces low integration. Rejoice, distributists! Small really is better – but not necessarily for the reasons you may think or want (putting this here as a reminder to finally write up “The Cybernetic Subsidiarity Principle”).

At the same time, however, Land’s argument that cyberpositive excitation is historically compensated by explosion-dampening forces must be taken seriously. “Self-organizing compensatory apparatuses — or negative feedback assemblies — develop erratically. They search for equilibrium through a typical behavior labeled ‘hunting’ — over-shooting adjustments and re-adjustments that produce distinctive wave-like patterns, ensuring the suppression of runaway dynamics, but producing volatility.” Read politically, this is the persistence of integration attempting to, as Deleuze and Guattari might say, ward off the flow that seek to escape or route around their blockages.

So, for a time at least, a mixed playing field seems likely, which will certainly induce volatility (and thus friction, and from there more complexity). I recently listened to a talk by Benjamin Bratton, titled “Processing Sovereignty”, that deals with this very problem. Anticipating that the entire geopolitical worldsphere will be rewritten according to the often imperceptible rules of the Stack, he argues that there is a two-fold process has begun: one in which ‘software consumes sovereignty’, and a reverse in which ‘software is consumed by sovereignty’. This has implications on patchworked paths into the future, which he notes by directly addressing the neocameralist variant:

New sovereign territories, I want to sort of underscore, are also drawn in parallel domains to the state but can be imagined as configured as diffuse and discontiguous incorporations from there, in each of which of ways that would redefine and reposition how we would locate this problem of emplacement. That it, that’s it’s not only the Cloud platform absorbs and redraws the functions of the state according to their more gossamer topologies. The production of new territories occurs as much if not more so by how much states absorb the functions of the Cloud and become Cloud platforms. So instead of thinking of new spaces as something developed in opposition to the state, which is then understood as a kind of fixed model, a landlocked entity against which liquid flows may swim, we need to see that states are also producing new territories and perhaps in some ways more important ones for, good or bad, the state itself is actually respatialized as a Stack.

Also, I’ll talk a little about this a bit more informally, about the relative continuity of those spaces may span from a kind of hard enclosure within a bounded territorial domain, to transoceanic atmospheric encapsulations, through information securitization and monetization, of course. Now, the argument I would propose and need some more time to draw out – and this is sort of what at least one of the chapters in the next book will do so – is a bit more like Schitt’s Großraum than it is like, for example, the neocameralist patchwork multiplication of Westphalian enclaves, though we see that too with as certain private polities proliferate. So that is to say that what we see instead is not one global Stack, but a mitosis of Stack genera, into a regime of multipolar hemispherical Stacks, in which the sovereign steerage of a state, even if unbounded by Westphalian borders exactly, remains paramount.